Poogona [he/him]

anyone who tries to claim there was any absolute standard of behavior for pre-industrial tribes like that is just doing fantasy worldbuilding

Every social organization you can think of was probably the way of life for someone out there, from patriarchy to matriarchy, communal to hierarchical

I get apprehensive around wasps too but it’s very funny to me how much hatred and distrust these animals are met with because they are able to force you to treat them with a little respect

It’s usually justified to make fun of STEMlords but scientists with highly specific skills are still a vital part of our societal whole (I choose to believe this for my own sake)

Oh yeah the Marine iguanas, incredible footage, some of the best ever imo.

I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails “a bunch of lesbos” and he wasn’t even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/

That study has a great diagram:

Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones

Naked mole rats are considered an example of a truly “eusocial” mammal analogue to ants. More evidence for the idea that social behavior/societal grouping, once established in a species, characterizes it more potently than just about anything else in its genetic history. Chimps might be our closest genetic relatives, but the way we live and think is probably much more similar to these guys.

Yeah the real issue in a way is that there’s just so much evidence of evolution happening that it’s hard to find a single shared pattern to study

Sometimes ants can’t smell ants either and you get supercolonies

Aussie magpies are ridiculously smart, love them as an example of convergent evolution since they are not corvids but rather songbirds that have evolved to be more crow-like to fill a similar niche to corvids

Studio Ghibli vibes

love me some land crustaceans

One common test is the famous “mirror test” where an animal is given some problem that can only be solved by using its own reflection in a mirror for reference, such as a study involving an Australian ant. They put a blue dot made of felt (I think) on the ant’s head behind the antennae, and watched the ant clean itself once it saw that it’s reflection had a weird blue thing on its head. But I don’t know if there are other tests for “self awareness”

Thankfully I crawled through with a passing grade, it’s all behind me

But the benzene rings, they still haunt my nightmares

So ashamed of how shit I was at organic chemistry

My brain just could not complete those fucking benzene rings why am I so INCOMPETENT WHY

That question below is honestly a good way to demonstrate how bad people can be at understanding what would be called materialism without it being explained to them first

Easy to assume the shape of that flower is due to decisions made by the plant itself instead of the more accurate way of understanding its shape being the result of external conditions and pressures acting upon the plant and its flower growth over a long time